Frozen Tragedy
by RedArtisticQueen
Summary: Hadley Acton (aka Hamlet) lived for the stage. She just didn't expect to live for it forever. As the spirit of drama and tragedy she's always been unwanted and ignored. But when Pitch rises again, and the Guardians need her, can she rise above her reputation and defeat him? And what about a certain face that she thought had died centuries ago? No pairings. May be slightly OOC.
1. Prologue

Hamlet was a tragedy. There was no doubt about that. It was the greatest tragedy ever written, and some said that its brilliance outweighed its sadness. But there is a reason that people can't say "Hamlet" in theaters. People don't want the horror of Hamlet to happen in real life up on the stage. It's bad luck.

It took Hamlet about twenty-five years to put that together in her head. _She_ was bad luck. People didn't call out her name because it was _bad luck_. Even if someone could see her, she would _never _know. It was the complete opposite of what she had been used to in life, and she didn't appreciate it at all. No rest for the wicked, her mother used to say, and apparently it was so, because she had not had rest in an eternity. She figured out quickly that no one could see her. It was almost like she didn't exist. Sometimes, she was sure she didn't.

Hamlet herself was a tragedy too.

The worst time though, was one day sometime in the mid-sixteen hundreds. She had existed for about sixty years by then, and a ten year old girl walked into the theater she liked to stay by.

"What are we doing here?" the girl asked her mother.

"We're here to see a play, Beth," the mother assured. "A magnificent one. One of Shakespeare's compositions."

"Is it Hamlet?" Beth asked, and Hamlet felt something explode in her, a fizzing, cold feeling, because sometimes, she didn't recognize her name, but sometimes, she did, and she was never sure how she felt about it. She had learned long ago not to say her own name out loud, especially when there was a play in session, and the word still sounded alien to her ears.

"Are we going to see Hamlet?" Beth asked again, and her mother pinched her face hard. The girl cried out and grabbed her cheek.

"It isn't proper to say "Hamlet" in a theater, Beth," she said in a harsh whisper. "It brings bad luck."

"But was Hamlet not a person?" she persisted. "A boy? Does he not want to hear his name?"

"He was a made-up boy," the mother said, dragging her daughter through the crowd. "He is not really here and he never really was."

The girl had turned around, obviously still looking for Hamlet, when their eyes had locked. And this time, she knew that she was seen, and this was the first person who had seen her ever and the worst part of it was, she knew exactly what was going to happen to her.

Hamlet _knew _her tragedy.

She averted her eyes from the girl and exited the theater. Then came the scary part, the awful part, the part that she didn't want to do, but she was Hamlet. You weren't supposed to say Hamlet in theaters- at least when the girl in question was present. She closed her eyes, knotted her skirt, and whispered, "Hamlet."

There was a crash inside the theater; one of the beams had collapsed. From the outside you could see the frame crashing in, people scrambling out through the sides, screaming and yelling for the blacksmiths and carpenters, and strong men to move beams and free people.

Beth ran out into the open, her face streaked with tears. Her mother was not with her. She stared, transfixed at Hamlet, backing away in horror.

"It was all my fault," she said. "You are Hamlet, are you not? You've done this?" She wiped away tears and ran into the street.

Hamlet knew that Beth's mother was dead. She could feel the sadness coming off of her, the desperation, the way pain was etched in the young girl's eyes. If she didn't have family, she too would die.

Oh yes, Hamlet knew her tragedy was probably where it had started that Hamlet was a girl. Most people just knew that he was a boy because of the story, but from first glance, she had always been a girl. It was cruel how that happened, but she didn't want to question the moon as to why it had picked a lady to do a man's job. She didn't fancy yelling at an inanimate object, no matter how much it screamed that it was alive. She never got the answers she demanded.

But the screams and wails slowly faded in the pouring rain, and the next day, the headline on the streets was the horrible crash at one of the theater tents, where twenty-seven people had died and one had gone missing. Hamlet tried to ignore it, tried to stay out of theaters for a while, because she was the spirit of stories, after all. Of music and poems and great productions. She sparked emotions and raised applause. She helped actors remember their lines and inspired some of the greatest after Shakespeare himself. That was her job.

But her job was also to shut down theaters and make scripts blow away in the wind. She prevented lyrics from fitting their music and left great works abandoned. She made crowds unresponsive and stole the lines from the mouths of actors. Because in words, her job was to make sure that breaking into show business was really as hard as it sounded.

Hamlet was there to make the lives of artists a little bit more tragic.


	2. First Attempts

Hadley had her bow leveled before she could blink.

Centuries of being ambushed from the side had raised her guard quite a bit, and the second she saw the blue out of the corner of her eye, she was on defensive. She walked backwards slowly down the abandoned street, but the flash of blue did not appear again.

Hadley lowered her bow and sighed. She was being paranoid again. It had been a hard day, one of her worst in a while, and she always felt like she was being tailed on days like this, when the rain was thick and hard and fell like sheets. She hated England sometimes; she really did.

She started walking again, not sure where she was going, only that it was away. Maybe she'd visit another country, or another continent. Maybe she'd go on another boat. The pirate ship had been fun enough. That had been a great age, the pirate one. Really brilliant.

This time she was sure she saw it. She leveled her bow to the rooftops and fired a warning shot. "Who are you?" she yelled. "I know you're there!" There was no answer. "I'm warning you!"

The only sound was the pounding of the rain against tin and concrete.

She put her arrow back in her quiver. "Fine," she whispered. "Just fine." She continued to stalk up the trail, her boots making large splashes as she hit puddles in her path. Whatever was following her, she hoped it wasn't like last time. Last time had not been fun at all.

The rain stuck her black hair to her forehead, and with a knocked bow in her hands she probably looked like an old-style murderer, but she had reached a point where she didn't really care how she looked because who was going to see her anyway, except possibly very small children or war veterans or over-dramatic teenage girls. And they wouldn't know that she was Hamlet. Why would she be Hamlet? Hamlet was a guy, they said. There's no way that some girl could be Prince Hamlet, they said. And she, if anything was sick and tired of hearing that.

She had just heard it again back in Surrey.

Surrey was not Hadley's favorite place to be.

Now she whirled and shot an arrow straight into the wall, and she could see in the flashes of lightning that it had almost hit a living thing, who was currently frozen with shock.

"I'm not in the best of moods today!" she shouted over the rain. "I don't know what you want, and I really don't care, so could it be handled another time, or should we just drop it altogether?"

Slowly a figure walked out of the shadows. His eyes were blue and his hair, though white, looked gray in the light. His blue hoodie was wet, and his feet were bare. Still, even with a new outfit and a new color scheme, Hadley could place him instantly. It almost made her drop her bow.

"Jackson," she said, too quiet for him to hear, but he might've. In that moment, there were so many emotions in her, mostly irrational anger, that she could barely think straight.

"So you must be Hamlet," he said, and her blood boiled.

"Don't call me that!" she snapped, and started to raise her bow again, but hands came from behind her and snapped around her wrists, and she had no choice but to drop her weapon as opposed to tearing it in half. She struggled, but a portal suddenly erupted in front of her and she was shoved through it, followed so closely inside that she could barely regain her balance before it had closed again, stranding her in a large room with people she didn't care to know.

"My bow," she said fiercely. "Where's my bow?"

Jackson looked over at her and held it out to her. "Here," he said. She snatched it away from him, almost shocked that he had touched it, and slung it in its rightful place over her back. She glanced at the giant room, but in truth, she was more interested in the people in it. There was silence before she spoke.

"Who are you?" Hadley asked, her fingers twitching with the unfamiliarity of the place. She didn't know why she had asked the question except maybe to see if he would lie; she knew who all of them were.

The large man stepped forward first. He had a pirate sword, which she approved of, but a giant red coat, which she didn't. In that instant, she remembered exactly why she had sworn off the color in the first place.

"You do not recognize us?" he asked, and his Russian accent was so thick it was almost tangible.

Hadley tapped her foot. "No. Should I?"

The man took a step back in total shock.

"You do not know Guardians?" she asked, apparently seriously taken off guard.

Hadley snorted. "Sorry, but no. I don't really keep up with your side of things." Most people would have taken "your side of things" as a definite clue, but not these guys. She saw that she would need more. "I mean, I know you're North, and that's Tooth and Sandy and Bunny, and I know that-" she whirled on Jackson. "You are I guess Jack Frost now, since that makes sense." She took a deep breath. "But I don't know what you do or did or will do and frankly I don't particularly care."

This was presumably something unheard of. She wasn't sure if she'd crossed a line or invented a new one altogether, but the fact that she didn't pay any attention to other spirits' affairs was a big deal.

North looked at her a minute, really looked at her, then said. "I see." It wasn't a good 'I see', either. "Well no matter!" he said with a sudden smile that looked extremely threatening to Hadley. "Well we shall just tell you! We are here to protect the children!"

A sinking feeling settled in Hadley's gut. "Oh really?"

"Yeah!" Jack said, apparently excited about it. He flew up to the globe-oh so _now_ he could fly-and pointed to all the shimmering dots. "All the lights on the globe are children who believe. In a nutshell, our job is to protect all of them, so that they don't go out."

"Oh," she said quietly. "So you _want _kids to believe in you." She knew that most spirits did, but she didn't know that there was literally an entire agency for it. It almost made her want to vomit.

"Don't you?" Jack asked.

Hadley felt the strong urge to laugh. "Me? No. Not really. I don't want people to believe in me but then again I don't want them not to… It's better if they don't know that I exist."

Jack looked angry all of a sudden. "Why would you say that?"

Hadley wasn't in the mood to talk about it. "It's complicated," she said shortly. "Which is why I don't know why _Guardians of children_ would bring me here."

"Well it wasn't our idea," Bunny said from his spot on the wall. He gestured over to a dais, where a glowing form of Hadley stood with her hand on her bow and her hair tied back. Hadley looked at the form, and then looked back at herself.

"Oh wow," she said. "You're telling me that something summoned me here."

"Manny," Tooth said, pointing through the open window at a full moon. She seriously thought it hadn't been nighttime eight seconds ago, and she was definitely sure that it was third waxing this week, not full. "He's like our boss."

"Well your boss needs to take a few off days if he thinks that I belong here," she snorted.

"C'mon, Hamlet-" Jack started.

"Stop saying that name!" she hissed at him, fists clenching at her sides. She backed up and tried to catch her breath. She wasn't even in a theater. Was she getting that edgy, that uptight about it?

_Yes,_ she decided. _Yes I am._

"My name is Hadley," she said calmly. "Hadley Acton. Not that other name, so please don't say it."

Jack put his hands up in surrender, but his eyes made no promises. Jack Frost, she thought. The name fit but didn't at the same time.

"Look, I don't know what you want me to do," she said. "I'm not really the kind of person you want if you're trying to protect people."

"We've got a problem," Bunny said. "And Manny thinks you can help us."

Hadley blew air through her mouth. "Look, if this is about Pitch rising again-"

"So you know something, yes?" North asked. She felt slightly closed in by the man no matter how far away he stood.

"Some things. Not a lot, just basic info. But I've got no reason to tell you."

Tooth piped up. "But the children-"

"Because I care deeply about the children?" she asked. "I don't, actually. Never have. I really don't care for children at all. Children practically _avoid _me and I them." She spun on her heel and looked around. "So if you could just point me towards the exit?"

Everyone stood stock still. Maybe she had just committed the equivalent of saying "Hamlet" in a theater, cursing children in the presence of Guardians.

Bunny clenched his jaw. "Well, look here now," he said, walking up and getting right in her face like New Yorker, even though his accent was distinctly Australian. "There are things we do that maybe you don't understand, and maybe we don't need yer help for anything, if you're not gonna give it nicely."

Hadley locked her own jaw. "Of course I'm not going to 'give it nicely'. I'm not a 'nice' person. I don't associate with 'nice' people, or rather, they prefer to ignore me and let me know I'm not worth acknowledging. So doing anything 'nicely' isn't really my kind of thing." She looked away from Bunny and started to walk towards the panel that she assumed was the door. "So if you don't mind, I think I'll be going now."

Sandy, who had been standing off to the side the whole time now rushed forward, sand images appearing over his head. Hadley shook her head.

"No, that is not an option," she said harshly, immediately feeling bad about it, but refusing to take it back.

She took her arrow off her back and grabbed a dark-tipped arrow. The other backed up and she almost laughed again. "I'm not going to shoot you," she snapped. "I'm just making an exit."

Hadley let the arrow fly. The black tip spread and created a giant hole in the door that seemed to fill the entire room with hot air and white smoke. Hadley jumped straight through. By the time the others realized where she was, she was clean through, and right before the hole closed, she saw Bunny's enraged face barreling towards it.

She went away clean with the satisfaction that he'd probably just hit the wall.

At first he didn't know where she was; she hadn't set a particular spot. But the cold and worn air around her and the dead, panicked chill on her neck let her know exactly where she was.

"Hadley Acton." said the low voice, and Hadley's hair stood on end. "Nice to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it, since we last met? The spirit that brings so many of my victims straight to me."

"Pitch," she said softly.

He walked out into the open. "Hamlet," he said in a tone that she did not like at all. "Don't be so touchy. I just wanted to have a talk."

* * *

**Okay, the first real chapter of this fic! Two things to say:**

** (1)I'm gonna make a confession right here right now that I ****_know_**** how OOC this whole thing is gonna be. I don't write fanfiction because I think I'm good. I ****_know_**** I can't keep characters ****_in-character_****. I write it because this is an idea and I want to see it put in the open. All OOC-ness is completely unintentional, but if that bothers you then you don't have to read it. I just don't want half a million people telling me how OOC my stories are because I ****_know_****. **

**and (2) William Joyce (the author of the books the movie was based on) has said that Jock Frost is 14. There's an official app out there somewhere (that I don't have) that says he's 17. This is kind of a heated argument in some parts of the fandom but I'm telling you right now that I don't know and don't care how old he is. It will probably never be mentioned in this story because it doesn't even ****_matter _**** to the storyline. Just a heads-up about that.**

** Peace! ~RedartisticQueen**


	3. Fighter's Reunion

Hadley took a deep breath and looked away from Pitch. "I have nothing to say to you. I never have anything to say to you.

"Oh," Pitch cooed. "I'm hurt. Come now, Hadley. I think we have lots to talk about."

"I don't think we do," she hissed. She had absolutely nothing to say to this man. "What country are we in?"

"I'd think you'd know, seeing as you sent yourself here."

"You _dragged_ me here, Pitch," she said through clenched teeth. "I never would come here on my own."

"I think you would, Hadley," he said. "You and I, we used to work together. Remember? Before I went public? You'd supply the disaster, and I would feed off the fear of those you spared. We made quite a team."

And they had. That was the part Hadley tried to forget, looking at the man who was the color or a water-logged corpse, who had sunken eyes and a horrid smile, that there a point in time when he'd thought the guy was amazing.

"That was different," Hadley said, kicking at rocks. "Very different. And you know it."

Pitch shrugged and looked northward, presumably towards the pole. "They know I've returned, don't they," he said.

"They aren't very smart," she couldn't resist saying, feeling as loose-lipped as she only did around friends, but she was trying not to consider him one anymore. "I knew before them."

"Hamlet," he said. She hated the way he switched between names back and forth. He'd always done it, like saying both names were parts of her, and she hated the reminder. She hated when other people reminded her of things in general, especially things that she wanted to forget.

He apparently didn't have anything else to say, because he didn't speak again for a long time. When he did, it was stark and bitter. "They must be smart enough," he spat. "Or just lucky. They got me, I'll admit. They used the children. Why didn't I think to use the children?" He glanced at Hadley. "This time, that's what I'm going to do."

Hadley's blood ran cold in her veins. "What do you mean 'use the children'?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" He snarled fiercely, drawing involuntarily closer, and Hadley reflexively leveled her bow to him. She was surprised she'd put it away in the first place. She'd never hesitated to keep it out, regardless of the person.

Pitch took a deep breath. "Sorry about that," he said, his voice normal again. "You know I'd never attack you, my former business partner."

Hadley decided to play along. "And I you," she conceded. She wondered why he was telling her this, but prayed he didn't stop. She didn't know what she found endearing about this encounter, but she somehow didn't want it to end, a feeling that bother thrilled and terrified her.

"So let's go from the top." He spread his hands. "I can see now, that I was aiming too high. I wanted the whole world. But I have to prioritize. You do that all the time, in your line of work, don't you?"

"Get to the point," she pushed.

"I have to eliminate all the barriers in my way before eliminating the item." He drew up a finger, his back spiky hair stiff in the winds the hurtled through the valley. "Which means that first I have to eliminate the guardians."

This hadn't surprised Hadley. It seemed like basic villain behavior. And Hadley had seen at least a million villains. "Eliminate, really?" Her bow was still level. Pitch approached her and softly lowered the tip of her arrow with his finger.

"Especially Jack Frost." The bitterness was stronger now. "He's got to go."

"Jackson Overland," she said, almost to herself. "Who wanted to be believed in so fiercely he saved the world for the chance to try."

"He's too good," he said. "I know that I can't defeat him alone."

"So you're not, are you?" Hadley's fingers tensed on her bow again. She fully expected someone to pop out of the woods at any minute-maybe another evil spirit, maybe a horrible holiday, or even worse: another Pitch Black. But nothing happened.

"No," he said. "No, I'm taking someone with me. Someone who helped me out from under the bed and agrees with me that something needs to be done, to be solved!"

"Who would agree with _anything _you suggest?" she asked fiercely. "Who would ever bother with you?"

Pitch smiled, his coat swaying as he walked. "You once did," he reminded her, and she felt her blood start to boil. "So it makes sense that he would too."

Hadley's breath caught as the simple clue put together pieces in her mind. "No."

"Yes."

And icy claw closed over her heart, and she shot an arrow at Pitch, or tried to. Her hands were trembling so hard she couldn't aim. It hit a tree six inches from his face. He stared at it with mild interest, and plucked it out as if he were just picking an apple. "You're getting sloppier," he noted.

"Leave him out of it," she said hoarsely. "Don't drag him into this one. He gets in enough trouble on his own."

"I know," Pitch said. "That's why it's perfect."

He snapped his finger, and a nightmare horse seemingly appeared out of nowhere. It was tall and its eyes were sinister, and even though they all looked the same, Hadley had learned long ago that all the nightmare horses were different and surprisingly independent. She hadn't met this one before. Pitch stroked its mouth and it neighed defiantly. "Remember when you would have walked over here and pet her too?" he asked out of literally nowhere. "Times were so simple, Hadley, and they could be simple again."

"I'm not helping you," she said.

"I know," he replied, looking at her menacingly through sunken eyes. "Do you wonder why I'm telling you this? All my plans? It's because I trust you."

"Why would I keep any secrets for you?" she said angrily, and aimed an arrow so that it hit three inches away from his face this time. He barely even flinched. Hadley supposed if you were made of fear you probably didn't feel it.

"I don't trust that you will," he said calmly, and she hated that almost more than life itself, when she was so mad that she wanted to scream and the other person acted like it wasn't a big deal. Like she was no threat, that her emotions didn't have any bearing on the situation. It made her feel expendable. Hadley was a lot of awful things, but she wasn't expendable, not in the slightest.

"What I think is that you're going to tell them, and they're going to do one of two things, which you already know, being who you are. Reactions make everything more fun."

Hadley clenched her fists right on her bow. Pitch opened his mouth to say more but she shot him straight through the head just as he vanished. Her arrow hit the tree behind where he'd been standing. It didn't matter. She'd made out the last words through the fog.

The damage was done.

Hadley gasped as she slid down the tree onto the cold hard ground. She picked at her skirt carelessly. It was the same skirt she'd had forever, since 1663, where it had been given to her on a pirate ship heading everywhere worth going. Her entire outfit was the same since then, and she'd liked it, but now all she could remember was walking through Amsterdam, and Pitch complimenting it, and she wanted to strip it off and burn it to shreds, but she couldn't. She liked this outfit and she liked what it stood for.

She just liked it a little bit less now.

The nightmare horse looked at her. All the horses knew about her; Pitch made sure of that, maybe as a kind of sick joke, maybe because he was trying to tell her something. It walked over to her, blowing smoke through its nostrils and urging her to meet it halfway.

_I don't trust that you will,_ he'd said. _What I think is that you're going to tell them, and they're going to do one of two things._

"You can't predict me Pitch," she said softly. "You can't know what I'm going to do."

She was getting a splitting headache, like she was missing out on important work, and she knew that she should probably go. There was always the part of her that didn't want to, but she had to, because Hadley didn't just walk away from hard work. Someone had to do the hard part and it was always her.

The nightmare horse whinnied.

_Former business partner_ he'd said. _You know I'd never attack you._

Was this an agreement to that deal?

Hadley left her bow on the ground for once, knowing it wasn't about to be stolen or smashed. She slipped her quiver off her shoulder and her dagger out of her skirt. It was just her and the horse. Hadley looked straight at it and it looked straight at her.

"I cut ties for a reason, you know," she told herself (and the horse) quietly. She reached out the touched the creature's nose. It was solid and warm and it felt breathtakingly alive. She took a deep breath, and smoothed her way down its mane. The nightmare sand came up around her hand, and she jerked it back, just as it began to swirl around her wrist, forming a band of obsidian that looked like a bracelet but felt like so much more.

The horse whinnied again and nudged the bracelet. Hadley just stared at it. Did she belong to Pitch now? Was that what that meant?

"If Pitch is having me, then I'm having you," she said defiantly, petting the horse's snout. It snorted, its amber eyes fierce and filled with what could only be accurately described as imminent pain. "You're Billow, and I'm keeping you."

The word immediately scratched itself into her bracelet, and then flashed, like she had just sealed some cosmic transaction. She looked at the horse, then at her bracelet, and this puzzle was put together like the last one.

"Oh," she said. "Ohhh."

She didn't belong to Pitch. But Pitch's horse sure belonged to her. And it would, until the day she broke the bracelet off.

The Boogeyman had given her a horse.

"No," she said. "Oh no. No no no."

Billow neighed to the stars as Hadley backed away. She had a feeling there was something she needed to do. "Go," she told the horse, feeling incredibly stupid. "Billow, go. I- um -I'll call you when I need you."

The horse neighed again, and reared. Where its hooves left the ground the grass had turned back and died. Then it flew upward into the sky, to wherever nightmares went, but considering it was always nighttime somewhere, Hadley had a pretty good idea.

She scooped up her bow and her arrows and decided to just walk. Her sense of distance was awful, but she hoped she wasn't too far from where she needed to be, because she wasn't in the mood to use unconventional transport. She gave Pitch's hole another look. Another day she wouldn't have hesitated to jump down just to see how much it had changed.

Hadley stared at the blank band on her wrist.

Today was not that day.


End file.
